Lin Muxi’s presence was a cool spring breeze in a slaughterhouse. She tapped her cane twice more, the sound oddly resonating against the heavy silence, then tilted her head slightly, her sightless eyes seeming to find Zong Xiaotian’s. Her lips, the faint color of morning mist, parted. “Xiaotian, what exactly is this ‘polite annulment’ you have orchestrated?” Xiaotian gave a breezy, unapologetic shrug, his newly invigorated left leg betraying no hint of its former weakness. “Ah, Lady Muxi. Just a minor squabble with my… former betrothed. Apparently, some feral reptiles from the Shadowfen Marshes decided to gatecrash the festivities. Rather rude of them, don’t you think?” He gestured vaguely at the crimson stains and scattered dust that marked where the guards had been. Bi Ruoxue, who had been frozen in horror, finally found her voice, a strangled gasp escaping her. “You… you lying wretch! They were your doing! You murdered them!” Xiaotian raised an eyebrow, wearing an easy smirk. “My dear Ruoxue, such wild charges. Do you truly believe a broom-wielder like me, a cast-off outer court drudge, could fell three peak Qi-Gathering cultivators? Perhaps the fright has rattled your brain. I was merely fending off those ravenous fiends.” He threw Muxi a charming, utterly brazen grin. “The Azure Ascendant Sect’s outer courtyard is turning into a wasteland, wouldn't you say? Perhaps our elders need to clean house.” Muxi’s delicate brows furrowed just slightly, a ripple across her serene features. “The Shadowfen Marshes are over five hundred li from here, Zong Xiaotian. And their beasts, while vicious, do not leave behind such… specific residue.” Her cane tapped the ground, once, near a patch of disturbed earth. “Nor do they annul engagements.” A low, sultry chuckle echoed not from Xiaotian’s lips, but from his shadow, which seemed to deepen and writhe momentarily. *“Oh, my little runt, she’s sharper than you gave her credit for. Such a pity she wastes that keen insight on trivialities when far grander secrets hide within her own meridians.”* Xiaotian ignored Yao Qingyu, his smirking mask fixed firmly in place. He struck an expression of wounded virtue. “Lady Muxi, you wound me. Are you implying I invented a tale to cover the regrettable defense of my honor?” Muxi offered no retort, reaching into the crisp folds of her sleeve. Her pale fingers withdrew a carved jade phial stoppered with red wax. The surface pulsed with jade brilliance. “Regardless of your tall tales, your marrow is ragged, Xiaotian. And your meridians, though stitched together, are bleeding.” She extended the phial. “This is a Veridian Dew Pill. It nourishes damaged qi and restores vitality. I… requisitioned it from the Inner Court’s Alchemist Pavilion. They will not notice.” Xiaotian stared at the phial, then at her sightless eyes. A pill from the Inner Court, worth a fortune in spirit stones. And she handed it to a discarded son without an interrogation or a sneer. A strange heat pricked behind his ribs. “Lady Muxi, this is…” *“Oh, look at the whelp, getting flustered!”* Yao Qingyu’s dry purr grated inside his skull. *“She pities you, does she? How touching. What a waste. Her core qi, the pristine nectar of her foundation, is being tapped like tree sap. Drained, hour by hour, to mend the rotten subterranean leylines beneath your boots. She’s their sacrificial ewe, Zong Xiaotian. A blind offering to keep this decrepit mountain standing. And you stand there grinning like a clown.”* Cold steel settled behind his ribs. Her core, drained to patch the leylines? He remembered the cracked flagstones around the inner peaks, the dying pine needles on the heights. Xiaotian ground his teeth so hard the molars ached, yet kept his easy smirk glued to his lips. “Are you certain you wish to waste such an elixir on an overgrown lizard scuffle?” Muxi tilted her head, a faint curve shaping her mouth. “I have my reasons, Xiaotian. And you will soon have yours. Take it.” Xiaotian accepted the phial, his calloused skin grazing her knuckles. Yao Qingyu’s wicked laughter rippled in his head. *“Ah, the sweet, silent agony of a broken beggar yearning for an altar. Almost as entertaining as watching a world burn.”* *“You still stomp like an ox in deep mud, boy,”* Yao Qingyu snapped, shifting into cold instruction. *“Your footwork rattles every pebble within ten paces. That girl could track your gait from a mile off. A true stalker slips between the cracks of perception. Empty your mind. I will carve an ancient art into your bone marrow: the Void-Severing Phantom Step.”* As Muxi walked away, her cane clicking against the cobblestones, burning diagrams of circulating qi seared across Xiaotian’s consciousness. The Void-Severing Phantom Step was not mere speed; it was an erasure of footprint and shadow, slipping into blind spots of human awareness. If he was to pry into the forbidden subterranean channels beneath the sect without her learning of it, this art was his only key. “Take care, Zong Xiaotian,” Muxi murmured as she crossed the archway threshold. “Keep your wits about you.” “Watch your step, Lady Muxi,” Xiaotian called back, watching her pale hem vanish into the white morning mist. The flagstones fell silent, save for the tang of butchered blood and burned sulphur. He popped the wax seal, tossing the emerald pill down his throat. Bitter herbs and mountain frost exploded across his tongue, numbing his torn channels and fusing the hairline fractures in his ribs. Beside his left boot, a thumb-sized grey shell scraped across the gravel. Baozi, his rock-chewing tortoise, blinked up at him with unblinking disdain, then let out a wet, gravelly burp. With a dull rasp, the creature coughed an obsidian pebble onto the dust. It flared with a dull scarlet core, smoking like charcoal. Xiaotian snatched it. An agonizing scorch shot up his forearm, phantom agony remembering the day his family gutted his dantian. This was no common gravel. It was a calcified scrap of his own stolen Marrow-Flame Bloodline. And if Baozi had just swallowed it from the soil here, the thief who harvested his flesh walked these outer court grounds.

The Blind Saintess and the Rock Turtle